THE MOST COMFORTABLE PRISON

Last Tuesday in Bengaluru, a 28-year-old software engineer stepped off his apartment balcony into silence. His suicide note was short: "I cannot keep up anymore. The EMIs, the expectations, the endless performance. I thought I was living my dream, but I was just living someone else's idea of success."

- DEEPAM CHATTERJEE

His Instagram account is still active on the internet. The last post, from Monday night, was a neatly filtered dinner photo captioned "Living my best life! #Blessed #Grateful."

The police called it "work stress." His family labelled it "depression." Newspapers filed him under statistics—another young professional gone. But truth has a sharper edge. This was not simply stress or illness. It was the quiet collapse of a man who realised his freedom had always been staged.

Are we really free, or just well-decorated slaves? We love telling ourselves we're independent. That our forefathers fought so we could live free. That we make our own choices. That nobody tells us what to do.

Really? Let's be honest—we are owned in ways far worse than the British Raj.

At least then the enemy wore a crown and sat in London. Today? The chains are invisible, the masters are everywhere, and we serve them willingly.

Our great-grandparents saw the Union Jack lowered and believed the chains had fallen. And yet here we are, eight decades later, bound again. No bayonets, no foreign accents—just invisible code written in Silicon Valley, banks that know our habits better than our families, social media feeds that harvest attention more efficiently than any East India Company galleon ever harvested spices.

We have traded the British masters for digital ones. Visible colonisation for invisible manipulation. Chains of iron for chains of thought—marketed as "personalisation" and "user experience."

The British took our gold and left. The new rulers take our data and stay. They don't lay tracks for railways—they lay fibre-optics, moving our attention and our desires across continents in milliseconds. Swaraj was meant to be self-rule, but now we rule ourselves exactly as they wish. We post, we buy, we click, we work—not from orders barked at us, but from nudges so gentle they feel like choice.